CHAPTER VI.

THE HEBREW GOSPEL.

This exposition of the Messianic life of Jesus, mixed up with
texts of the old prophets, always the same, and capable of being recited in a single
sitting, was early settled in almost invariable terms, at least so far as the sense
is concerned. Not merely did the narrative unfold itself according to a predetermined
plan, but the characteristic words were settled so that the word often guided the
thought and survived the modifications of the text. The framework of the Gospel
thus existed even before the Gospel itself, almost in the same way as in the Persian
dramas of the death of the sons of Ali the order of the action is settled, whilst
the dialogue is left to be improvised by the actors. Designed for preaching, for
apology, for the conversion of the Jews, the Gospel story found all its individuality
before it was written. Had the Galilean disciples, the brothers of the Lord, been
consulted as to the necessity for having the sheets containing this narrative worked
into a consecrated form, they would have laughed. What necessity is there for a
paper to contain our fundamental thoughts, those which we repeat and apply every
day? The young catechists might avail themselves, for some time, of such aids to
memory; the old masters felt only contempt for those who used them.

Thus it was that until the middle of the second century the words
of Jesus continued to be cited from
50memory often with considerable variations. The texts of the evangelists
which we possess, existed; but other texts of the same kind existed by the side
of them; and, besides, to quote the words or the symbolical features of the life
of Jesus no one felt obliged to have recourse to the written text. The living tradition
was the great well from which all alike drew. Hence the explanation of the fact
which is in appearance surprising, that the texts which have become the most important
part of Christianity were produced obscurely, confusedly, and at first were not
received with any consideration.

The same phenomenon makes its appearance furthermore in almost
all sacred literatures. The Vedas have been handed down for centuries without having
been written; a man who respected himself ought to know them by heart. He who had
need of a manuscript to recite these ancient hymns confessed his ignorance; so that
the copies have never been held in much esteem. To quote from memory from the Bible,
the Koran, is, even in our days, a point of honour amongst Orientals. A part of
the Jewish Thora must have been oral before it was written down. It was the same
with the Psalms. The Talmud, finally, existed for two hundred years before it was
written down. Even after it was written, scholars long preferred the traditional
discourses to the MSS. which contained the opinions of the doctors. The glory of
the scholar was to be able to cite from memory the greatest possible number of
the solutions of the casuists. In presence of these facts, far from being astonished
at the contempt of Papias for the Gospel texts existing in his time, amongst which
were certainly two of the books which Christianity has since so deeply revered,
we find his contempt in perfect harmony with what might be expected from a “man
of tradition,” an “elder,” as those who had spoken of him have called him.

It may be doubted whether before the death of the Apostles, and
the destruction of Jerusalem, all that collection of narratives, sentences, parables,
and prophetic citations had been reduced to writing. The features of the divine
figure before which eighteen centuries of Christians have prostrated themselves,
were first sketched about the year 75. Batanea, where the brothers of Jesus lived,
and where the remnant of the Church of Jerusalem had taken refuge, appears to have
been the country where this important work was executed. The tongue employed was
that in which the very words of Jesus had been uttered, that is to say, Syro-Chaldaic,
which was abusively called Hebrew. The brothers of Jesus, the fugitive Christians
of Jerusalem, spoke that language, little different besides from that of the Bataneans,
who had not adopted the Greek tongue. It was in an obscure dialect, and without
literary culture, that the first draft of the book which has charmed so many souls
was traced. It was in Greek that the Gospel was to attain its perfection, the last
form which has made the tour of the world. It must not, however, be forgotten that
the Gospel was first a Syrian book, written in a Semitic language. The style of
the Gospel—that charming turn of childlike narrative which recalls the most limpid
pages of the old Hebrew books—penetrated with a species of idealistic ether that
the ancient people did not know, and which has nothing of Greek in it. Hebrew is
its basis. A just proportion of materialism and spirituality, or rather an indiscernible
confusion of soul and sense, makes that adorable language the very synonym of poetry,
the pure vestment of the moral idea, something analogous to Greek sculpture, where
the ideal allows itself to be touched and loved.

Thus was sketched out by an unconscious genius that masterpiece
of spontaneous art, the Gospel, not such and such a gospel, but this species of unfixed
52poem, this unrevised masterpiece where every defect is a beauty,
and the indefiniteness of which has been the chief cause of its success. A portrait
of Jesus, finished, revised, classic, would not have had so great a charm. The
Agada,
the parable, do not require hard outlines. They require the floating chronology,
the light transition, careless of reality. It is by the Gospel that the Jewish
agada
has been universally accepted. The air of candour is fascinating. He who knows how
to tell a tale can catch the crowd. Now, to know how to tell stories is a rare privilege; a
naïveté, an absence of pedantry of which a solemn doctor is hardly capable,
are absolutely necessary. The Buddhists and the Jewish Agadists (the evangelists
are true Agadists) have alone possessed this art in the degree of perfection which
makes the entire universe accept a story. All the stories, all the parables which
are repeated from one end of the world to the other, have but two origins, one Buddhist
and the other Christian, because Buddhists and the founders of Christianity alone
had the care of the popular preaching. The situation of the Buddhists with regard
to the Brahmans was in a sense analogous to that of the Agadists with regard to
the Talmudists. The latter have nothing which resembles the Gospel parable, any
more than the Brahmans would have arrived by themselves at a turn so light, so agile,
and so flowing as the Buddhist narrative. Two great lives well told, that of Buddha
and that of Jesus—there lies the secret of the two vastest religious propaganda
that humanity has ever seen.

The Halaka has converted no one; the Epistles of St Paul alone
would not have won a hundred disciples to Jesus. That which has conquered the hearts
of man is the Gospel, that delicious mixture of poetry and the moral sense, that
narrative floating between dreams and reality in a Paradise where no note is taken
of time. In all that there is assuredly a little literary
53surprise. The success of the Gospel was due on the one hand to
the astonishment caused amongst our heavy races by the delicious strangeness of
the Semitic narrative, by the skilful arrangement of these sentences and discourses,
by these cadences, so happy, so serene, so balanced. Strangers to the artifices
of the agada, our good ancestors were so charmed with them that even in the present
day we can scarcely persuade ourselves that this species of narrative may be devoid
of objective truth. But to explain how it has happened that the Gospel may have
become amongst all nations what it is, the old family book whose worn pages have
been moistened with tears, and on which the finger of generations has been impressed,
more is required. The literary success of the Gospel is due to Jesus himself. Jesus
was, if we may so express ourselves, the author of his own biography. One experience
proves the fact. There have been many Lives of Jesus in the past. Now the life of
Jesus will always obtain a great success when the writer has the necessary degree
of ability, of boldness, and of naïveté to translate the Gospel into the style of
his time. A thousand reasons for this success may be looked for, but there is never
more than one, and that is the incomparable intrinsic beauty of the Gospel itself.
When the same writer later on attempts a translation of St Paul, the public will
not be attracted. So true it is that the eminent person of Jesus trenching vigorously
on the mediocrity of his disciples was pre-eminently the soul of the new apparition,
and gave to it all its originality.

The Hebrew Protavangel was preserved in the original amongst the
Nazarenes of Syria until the fifth century. There are besides Greek translations
of it. A specimen was found in the library of the priest Pamphilus of Cæsarea;
St Jerome is said to have copied the Hebrew text at Aleppo, and even to have translated
it. All the Fathers of the Church have found that this Hebrew Gospel is much like the Greek
54Gospel which bears the name of St Matthew. They usually assume
that the Greek Gospel attributed to St Matthew was translated from the Hebrew, but
the deduction is erroneous. The generation of our Gospel of St Matthew was a much
more complicated matter. The resemblance of the Gospel with the Gospel of the Hebrews
does not go so far as identity. Our St Matthew is anything but a translation. We
will explain later on why of all the Gospel texts the latter approaches most nearly
to the Hebrew prototype.

The destruction of the Judeo-Christians of Syria brought about
the disappearance of the Hebrew text. The Greek and Latin translations, which created
a disagreeable discord by the side of the canonical Gospels, also perished. The
numerous quotations made from it by the Fathers, allow us to imagine the original
up to a certain point. The Fathers had reason to connect it with the first of our
Gospels. This Gospel of the Hebrews, of the Nazarenes, resembled in truth much
of that which bears the name of Matthew, both in plan and in arrangement. As to
length, it holds the middle place between Mark and Matthew. It is impossible sufficiently
to regret the loss of such a text, though it is certain that even supposing we still
possessed the Gospel of the Hebrews seen by St Jerome, our Matthew would be preferred
to it. Our Matthew, in a word, has been preserved intact since its final revision
in the last years of the first century, whilst the Gospel of the Hebrews, through
the absence of an orthodoxy (the jealous guardian of the text) amongst the Judaising
Churches of Syria, has been revised from century to century, so that at the last
it was no better than one of the apocryphal Gospels.

In its origin it appears to have possessed the characteristics
which one expects to find in a primitive work. The plan of the narrative was like
that of Mark, simpler than that of Matthew and Luke. The
55virginal birth of Jesus does not figure in it at all. The struggle
about the genealogies was lively, and the great battle of Ebionism took place on
this point. Some admitted the genealogical tables into their copies, while others
rejected them. Compared with the Gospel which bears the name of Matthew, the Gospel
of the Hebrews, so far as we can judge by the fragments which remain to us, was
less refined in its symbolism, more logical, less subject to certain objections
of exegesis, but of a stranger, coarser supernaturalism, more like that of Mark.
Thus the fable that the Jordan took fire at the Baptism of Jesus—a fable dear to
popular tradition in the earlier ages of the Church—is to be found there. The form
under which it was supposed that the Holy Spirit entered into Jesus at that moment,
as a force wholly distinct from himself, appears also to have been the oldest Nazarene
conception. For the transfiguration, the Spirit, which was the Mother of Jesus,
takes her Son by a hair, according to an imagination of Ezekiel (Ezek. viii. 3),
and in the additions to the book of Daniel, and transports him to Mount Tabor. Some
material details are shocking, but are altogether in the style of Mark. Finally
some features which had remained sporadic in the Greek tradition, such as the anecdote
of the woman taken in adultery, which is thrust rightly or wrongly into the fourth
Gospel, had their place in the Gospel of the Hebrews.

The stories of the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection,
presented evidently in that Gospel a character apart. Whilst the Galilean tradition
represented by Matthew will have it that Jesus appointed a meeting with his disciples
in Galilee, the Gospel of the Hebrews—without doubt because it represented the tradition
of the Church of Jerusalem—supposed that all the appearances took place in that
city, and attributed the first vision to James. The endings of the Gospels of St
Mark and St Luke place, in the same
56way, all the apparitions at Jerusalem. St Paul followed an analogous tradition.

One very remarkable fact is that James, the man of Jerusalem,
played in the Gospel of the Hebrews a more important part than in the evangelical
tradition which has survived. It appears that there was amongst the Greek evangelists
a sort of agreement to efface the brother of Jesus, or even to allow it to be supposed
that he played an odious part. In the Nazarene Gospel, on the contrary, James is
honoured with an appearance of Jesus after his resurrection; that apparition is
the first of all; it is for him alone; it is the reward of the vow, full of lively
faith, that James had made, that he would neither eat nor drink until he had seen
his brother raised from the dead. We might be tempted to regard this narrative as
a sufficiently modern resetting of the legend, without a single important circumstance.
St Paul in the year 57 also tells us that, according to the tradition which he had
received, James had had his vision. Here, then, is an important fact which the Greek
evangelists suppressed, and which the Gospel of the Hebrews related. On the other
hand, it appears that the first Hebrew edition embodies more than one hostile allusion
to Paul. People have prophesied, and cast out devils in the name of Jesus: Jesus
openly repulses them because they have “practised illegality.” The parable of the
tares is still more characteristic. A man has sown in his field only good seed;
but whilst he slept an enemy came, sowed tares in the field, and departed. “Master,”
said the servants, “didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? from whence then
hath it tares?” And he said unto them, “An enemy hath done this.” The servants
said unto him, “Wilt thou that we go and gather them up?” But he said unto them, “Nay, lest while ye gather up the tares ye
root up also the wheat with them. Let
both grow together until the harvest, and in the time of harvest I will say to the
57reapers, gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in
bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” It must be remembered
that the expression “the enemy” was the name habitually given by the Ebionites
to Paul.

Was the Gospel of the Hebrews considered by the Christians of
Syria, who made use of it, as the work of the Apostle Matthew? There is no valid
reason for such a belief. The witness of the fathers of the Church proves nothing
about the matter. Considering the extreme inexactitude of the ecclesiastical writers,
when Hebrew affairs are in question, this perfectly accurate proposition, “The Gospel
of the Hebrews of the Syrian Christians resembles the Greek Gospel known by the
name of St Matthew,” transforms itself into this, with which it is by no means synonymous:—“The Christians of Syria possessed
the Gospel of St Matthew in Hebrew,” or rather,
“St Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew.” We believe that the name of St Matthew
was not applied to one of the versions of the Gospel until the Greek version which
now bears his name was composed, which will be much later. If the Hebrew Gospel
never bore an author’s name, or rather a title of traditional guarantee, it was
the title of “the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles,” sometimes also that of “the Gospel
of Peter.” Still, we believe that these names were given later, when Gospels bearing
the names of the Apostles came into use. A decisive method of preserving to the
original Gospel its high authority, was to cover it with the authority of the entire
Apostolic College.

As we have already said, the Gospel of the Hebrews was ill preserved.
Every Judaising sect of Syria added to it, and suppressed parts of it, so that the
orthodox sometimes presented it as swollen by interpolation to a greater size than
St Matthew, and sometimes as mutilated. It was especially in the
58hands of the Ebionites of the second century that the Gospel of
the Hebrews arrived at the lowest point of corruption. These heretics issued a Greek
version the style of which appears to have been awkward, heavy, overloaded, and
in which, moreover, the writer did not fail to imitate Luke and the other Greek
evangelists. The so-called Gospels of Peter and of the Egyptians came from the same
source, and presented equally an apocryphal character and a mediocre standard.